Film & Media Studies | Faculty
Karen Bowdre, Assistant Professor
Professor Bowdre has an A.B.from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy and International Affairs, an M.S. from Villanova University in Human Organization Science, and an M.S. from Cornell University in Communication. She received her Ph.D. in the School of Cinema-Television from the University of Southern California in 2006. Karen’s dissertation entitled, “Racial Mythologies: African American Female Images and Representation from Minstrelsy to Race Films,” studies the significant impact black female performers--many of them overlooked by historians and media scholars--have had on representations of women in popular culture. Karen has presented work on this and related topics at, among other places, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the National Communication Association. In the fall Karen plans to offer a course on African-American cinema and a course on black film directors. Karen's research on critical race and gender studies will add important dimensions to the department's ongoing scholarly and pedagogical commitments to exploring identity politics, while also resonating with the interests of other units on campus, including African-American and African Diaspora Studies, American Studies, and Cultural Studies. More...
Stephanie DeBoer, Assistant Professor
Stephanie DeBoer received her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in 2007. Her research and teaching interests include Japanese and Chinese language film and media; global media studies; inter-Asia cultural studies; memory and transnational film/media; critical approaches to digital media in the context of globalization; and film and media’s intersection with concerns of space, place and mobility. Her work is grounded in the historical and contemporary stakes of exchange in East Asian and Asia Pacific screen media, and attentive to the dynamics through which media theory is negotiated across a range of disciplinary, critical and cultural contexts. A recent recipient of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC/JSPS) Postdoctoral Fellowship, she is currently writing a manuscript on Asia Pacific film, television and media co-productions in the second half of the twentieth century. She also has experience in the instruction and production of multimedia scholarship. Professor DeBoer is also faculty within the International Studies Program and Department of East Asian Studies. More...
Mary L. Gray, Assistant Professor
Professor Gray received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 2004. Her teaching and research interests include: intersections of new media, social movements, and cultural identity; social theory and ethnography of gender and sexuality; sociology of youth and public culture; qualitative methodologies, particularly ethnography online and in non-urban settings; and pedagogy of research ethics and its relationship to the construction of scientific knowledge and practice. More...
Joan Hawkins, Associate Professor
Joan Hawkins received her Ph.D in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley in 1993. She teaches courses on the horror genre; experimental film, theater and performance art; women directors; French cinema; panic culture; media theory and media history. Her research continues to focus on the politics of taste culture, gender and sexuality. Sample publications include: Cutting Edge: Art Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), “ ‘Dark, Disturbing, Provocative and Quirky’: Avant Garde Cinema of the 80s and 90s” (Cotemporary American Independent Cinema: From the Mainstream to the Margins, 2005), “When Taste Politics Meet Terror: The Critical Art Ensemble on Trial” (CTheory, 2005), “When Bad Girls Do French Theory” (Life in the Wires, 2004), “ ‘No Worse Than You Were Before’: Theory Economy and Power in Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction” (Underground USA, 2002). She is currently working on a book on "Downtown Film and Video Culture:1975-2001". Prof. Hawkins is also the faculty advisor for the student-run Underground Film Series. More...
Barbara Klinger, Professor
Barbara Klinger received her Ph.D. in Film Studies from the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa in 1986. Her research and teaching interests focus on U.S. cinema; reception, audience, and fan studies; cinema and new media/technologies; film and convergence culture; media theory, history, and criticism; and gender studies. More...
Joshua S. Malitsky, Assistant Professor
Professor Malitsky received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2005. His teaching and research interests include documentary history, theory, and criticism; non-fiction film and nation-building; intersections between documentary, ethnographic film, and the avant-garde; early Soviet cinema; Cuban cinema; West African cinema; realism; and sports media. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Post-Revolution Non-Fiction Film: Building the Soviet, Yugoslav, and Cuban Nations. Professor Malitsky is affiliated faculty with the Russian and Eastern European Institute (REEI) and Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS). More....
Michael T. Martin, Professor
Professor Martin received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His research interest include diasporic and émigré formations; transnational migration; third world and postcolonial
cinemas. He is currently working on two publications entitled Caribbean Cinemas: Evolution, Articulations, Transnationality and History Betrayed: Gillo Pontecorvo's Cinema of Decolonization.
Susanne Schwibs, Lecturer
Susanne Schwibs is an award winning documentary filmmaker with experience in film, video, and digital production. She works as a producer/director for Radio-Television Services and WTIU-TV at Indiana University, teaches production courses in Communication & Culture, and oversees the department’s production facilities. Her creative work encompasses long-form documentaries with a focus on the arts, as well as shorter works, including music films and artists’ profiles. Susanne’s work is broadcast nationally through PBS and APT (American Public Television). Among her titles are: Beaux Arts at 50 (2006), American Horizons: The Photographs of Art Sinsabaugh (2004), Hometown: A Journey Through Terre Haute, Indiana (2004), Spanning Time: America’s Covered Bridges (2004), No Compromise: Lessons in Feminist Art with Judy Chicago (2002), and Sugarplum Dreams: Staging the Nutcracker Ballet (2001). Susanne’s teaching interests include 16mm film and video production, documentary production, and guiding independent student projects in film or digital media.
More...
Ted Striphas, Assistant Professor
Ted Striphas is director of Film & Media Studies. His primary research interest areas include: media history, theory, and criticism; cultural studies; Marxism; and the philosophy of communication and culture. His book project, which is tentatively titled The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture From Consumerism to Control, traces the ways in which books--in conjunction with television, digital computers, and a host of related technical and social processes--have been integral to the making of a connected, modern consumer culture in the 20th and 21st centuries, and how they remain at the forefront of its unmaking and remaking today. He also has a strong interest in the politics of intellectual properties and the institutional formations of cultural studies. His teaching interests include: media history, theory, analysis, and criticism; cultural studies; Marxism; and the philosophy of communication and culture. More...
Gregory A. Waller, Professor
Professor Waller received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1978. His work covers a range of topics in film studies, including the history of exhibition and distribution, American popular movie genres, and New Zealand cinema. He is currently working on "Movies on the Road," a study of travelling film exhibitions in the 1930s and 1940s and on "Japan-in-America," a comprehensive look at the representation of Japan in the United States, 1890-1915. Professor Waller spent May-June 2005 at Nankai University, Tianjin, China, as part of a faculty exchange program. He has also been a Fulbright scholar at Waikato University in New Zealand (1993) and a participant in the Appalachian-Rome Program at the University of Rome, La Sapienza (2002). He received a grant from the Toshiba Foundation to fund "Japan-in-America at the Turn of the Twentieth Century," a multi-media exhibit scheduled to open at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures on the Indiana University at Bloomington campus in March 2005. More...
James O. Naremore, Emeritus Professor
James Naremore is Chancellors’ Professor Emeritus in Communication and Culture, English, and Comparative Literature. His research deals with classic Hollywood cinema and modernist literature and is especially concerned with questions of style, cultural politics, and ideology. He has written on a wide variety of twentieth-century artists, including Virginia Woolf, Orson Welles, and Alfred Hitchcock, and has published extensively on such general topics as film adaptation, film authorship, film acting, and film genre. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he is editor of Film Adaptation (2000) and the Contemporary Film Directors series, and is co-editor (with Patrick Brantlinger) of Modernity and Mass Culture (1991). His books on film include Filmguide to Psycho (1973), The Magic World of Orson Welles (1979, revised edition 1988), Acting in the Cinema (1987), The Films of Vincente Minnelli (1993), and More than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts (1999, revised edition 2007), which was awarded the Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award and a commendation from the Society of Cinema Studies in 2000. Naremore’s most recent book is On Kubrick (2007). More...
